Artwork
by q345
Summary: There are many different forms of madness. Postgame. Dark Cloud/Tifa


_Artwork_

"Tifa!" The muted crash and Marlene's ensuing wail are audible from the floor above. Tifa hastily abandons the unopened can of primer she is attempting to pry open. It thuds on its side and rolls clumsily across the battered floorboards of the bar. Uncaring, Tifa dashes downstairs imagining every possible horrific scenario which could occur in the cluttered garage: Marlene impaling her foot on a loose nail, spider bites, a bone-breaking stumble... She should have gotten the damn screwdriver herself and never have sent Marlene.

Tifa can't repress a gasp of relief when she finds Marlene uninjured. The little girl is surrounded by pages of loose paper, strewn from a dented aluminum box. Marlene clings to the yellow-handled screwdriver and surveys the mess with obvious dismay. "I didn't mean to knock over Cloud's things! Do you think he'll be mad?" Marlene wails.

Tifa kneels and takes each of Marlene's tiny hands in her gentle, deceptively callused grasp. "Of course he won't be," Tifa assures her, as she swings Marlene's arms in wide arcs. "Don't worry. I'll clean everything up. Go ahead upstairs. I made some chocolate chip cookies this morning. You can be my taste tester." She gives Marlene a silly wink, both assuaging the girl's fears and causing her to giggle.

Marlene skips upstairs, leaving Tifa alone in the garage. Only then, does Tifa allow her smile to fade. Even if Cloud knew, he wouldn't have been angry. He probably wouldn't even notice. With each passing day, he grows increasingly distant and troubled. He rarely makes eye contact with Tifa and has long since severed virtually all contact with their former friends. Whenever he is spoken to, his replies are always halting and belated as he visibly wrenches himself away from his grasping thoughts just long enough to answer.

Things haven't always been so uncertain and strange between them. In fact, right after she encountered him at the Midgar train station and wheedled Barret into allowing him a place in AVALANCHE, Tifa was unwaveringly certain that everything could finally work out between the two of them like they never had in Nibelheim. Yes, his memories were oddly erroneous, and sometimes his mannerisms seemed alien and forced but it was easy to smother those inaccuracies in a tangle of limbs and cold kisses behind the counter after hours. But that brief, idyllic interlude abruptly ended and each excruciating revelation of Cloud's fractured past ripped them farther and farther apart from one another. Cloud never touches her now. It's easy for Tifa to blame herself. After all, she kept silent, as though she'd sewn her own lips shut with silver thread.

Tifa sighs and wearily sweeps her dark hair away from her face. She rights the metal box and begins to gather the sheets of paper. Tifa respects Cloud's secrets. She wouldn't even have looked at the papers, just stuffed them back where they came from. But the first one she picks up is a gruesomely accurate portrayal of Nibelheim burning. Tifa is helplessly transfixed by the picture and some distant part of her thinks that she never knew Cloud could draw. The picture centers around the open door of the inn. Black smoke surges from the doorway and the burst windows, framing a seared, blistered corpse strewn across the entrance, with flames still eating what little flesh remains. Tifa drops the picture, presses her palms to her eyes, and breathes deeply to combat her sudden vertigo. For a second, she feels as though she's still there, in Nibelheim. Even now she can vividly recall the taste of the thick, oily ash, the repulsively sweet stench of burning flesh, and the horrific octaves of tortured screams. Fractically, Tifa seizes the other papers. All of them are drawings. Each one is a horror. There is a laboratory, walls lined with meathooks and impossibly long hypodermic needles. Next is Hojo's leering visage with the body of a Zolom, systematically consuming Zack's prone body. Sephiroth, frozen in a fit of his terrifying, maniacal laughter, with fire streaming from his hair. Aerith, drowning in the lake of the Forgotten Capital, blood and viscera blooming from the wet, gaping wound in her abdomen. Then there's Aerith again, her chest cavity exposed and Sephiroth plucking out her still beating heart. Sephiroth again, this time his arms and his grotesque wings are wrapped possessively around Cloud, dragging both of them into a seething pit of mako.

All of the parchment monstrosities bear Cloud's desperate signature, sometimes more than once, in an attempt to reaffirm his identity through the repetition of the huge, scribbled letters of his name.

Only one drawing features Tifa. He's drawn her in a lovely white dress with soft, shaded lines. Over her unrealistically pristine shoulder is a deranged portrait of himself, struggling to pry his clawed hands away from the grip he has on her neck. He's depicted himself as an emaciated atrocity with bloodless skin and an unmistakable pair of luminescent green eyes. This picture is the only one that isn't signed and instead is marked with a crude rendering of a cloud.

Tifa stares at the picture for a long time, until Marlene calls out worriedly. Tifa voices a reassurance and puts the pictures away. She hesitates, over the closed lid of the box. She considers pretending that she never saw these drawings but swiftly dismisses the possibility. Tifa isn't a woman who runs from things. Not anymore. She leaves a note atop the lid for him to find, which simply reads "You _are_ real, Cloud."

Cloud doesn't arrive at the new Seventh Heaven until well after dinner. Tifa is in the middle of drying the dishes when he finally appears. By way of greeting, Marlene lunges at him and hugs him around the waist. The dust of travel will undoubtedly dirty Marlene's white shirt with the pink rose pattern but Tifa doesn't rebuke her. It's important to show the people you care about how much you love them while you still have the chance. No one knows this better than Tifa.

Awkwardly but affectionately, Cloud ruffles Marlene's hair. She refuses to go to bed until Cloud promises that he'll be there when she wakes up. Tifa tucks her in and she and Cloud return to the bar. Their watery and vaguely ominous reflections are visible in the newly scrubbed floor. He holds her letter but neither immediately speaks. In the dim lighting, Cloud's pale features are strikingly haunting. His white-blonde hair hides half of his face and Tifa clenches her fist to prevent herself from carefully tucking it behind his ear. His arms are crossed, and she can't tell if he's trying to ineffectually seem aggressive or to hold himself together. Typical Cloud. He's always been a mixture of both ferocity and delicacy. "Cloud..." she says quietly, and she winces at her pleading tone.

"I still hear them," he says. A half-smile crawls tragically at the corner of his colorless mouth. "He's laughing." Tifa shakes her head, a little wildly, trying to deny what he's just said. "We can work through this together. We did before."

And finally, the bottomless blue of his eyes meet hers.

"No." Cloud replies soflty and rubs the back of his head in a gesture not his own. "It's too dangerous. I'm a danger to you and Marlene and everyone else. I...I have to go away for awhile, soon. To sort some things out."

Tifa knows when she's been defeated. She swallows the appeals to reconsider which are tinged like bile and glass. Oddly, all she can think about is a day from her childhood, when with a malicious grin that exposed all of his crooked rat teeth, Johnny hurled a rock through the kitchen window of the Strifes' residence. Tifa arrived too late to stop him and she's always harbored a dark guilt for preventing it to happen. She remembers Mrs. Strife's feeble cry, and how her tiny mouth made a perfect O of surprise and hurt. And she remembers the way the window sounded when it broke—like a shattering heart.

Tifa's throat constricts and though she blinks rapidly, she manages not to cry. She's the pillar of strength for her pseudo family. She can't let them see her cry. She tilts her head back to study the shadows patterning the ceiling. "I'll wait for you. If you want me to." Cloud lightly touches her arm, his gloved hand a timid bird. "When I come back...I have to tell you something." She knows he's asking her to wait, in his own inscrutable way.

When Cloud departs the next morning, he burns all his drawings. He jumps on Fenrir, and races off to make a delivery to the pharmacy in Kalm. He drives in the dangerous, lunatic manner of a kid with a new license, even though he's never had that experience. Tifa wishes she could give him back the five years that were stolen from him but Tifa has a lot of wishes that haven't come true.

Outside, the day is chilly and overcast. An arid wind from the ruins of Midgar gusts strongly through the town. The small heap from Cloud's artwork is still smoldering. The embers singe Tifa's fingers as she spells out in fire and ash _I'll be here_ and she sketches a wavering heart around the words. The wind comes and whisks the ashes away, carrying the letters of her promise into the abyss of the sky.


End file.
